ALAPPUZHA, APRIL 9 : In Kerala’s once-acclaimed rice bowl, Kuttanad, comrades are making sure farmers stick to the good old sickle just as their forefathers did, and avoid all modern “bourgeois farm machines”. The apparatchiks are also working on a detailed diktat specifying which individual farmer could sow and reap his crop when, from next year.
Unlike elsewhere in the country, no farmer here can use things like harvesting machines, unless they have the comrades’ sanction. Each farmer must apply to the local office of the CPM’s Travancore Karshaka Thozhilali Union (TKTU), part of Kerala State Karshaka Thozhilali Union (KSKTU), the party’s farm worker union. The union will then consider the applications on a case-to-case basis, send its own inspection teams to the farms. The comrade-inspectors will determine if enough of their union members are really not available to manually do what farm machines could do a lot cheaper and much more efficiently — at wages fixed by the union. Any farmer who dares to use a farm machine without union sanction has to be ready for the consequences.
“Farm machines are good only for farmers, helping them make big profits,” say C K Bodhanandan, TKTU general secretary. “But they don’t benefit workers. We won’t allow machines to harm workers’ interests,” he told The Indian Express. But even this is a big change — till some three years ago, the CPM and its union had used its might to implement a blanket ban on harvesting machines in this area of over 1 lakh hectares of paddy farms. Some eight years ago, some farmers got together to bring in their first ever farm machinery — basic threshing machines. They had to hastily send them back after the comrades threatened to destroy them.
All this when both rice production and the area under paddy in Kerala has been plummeting over the years. The state depends on its neighbours for about 80 per cent of its requirement. It had 2.76 lakh hectares under paddy last year, against 7.53 lakh hectares in 1961-62, a clear 63 per cent drop. Kerala needs at least 30 tonnes to feed its people, but its rice production was 6.3 lakh tonnes last year, against the 13.39 lakh tonnes in 1981.
